A Discourse on Possible Futures

After more than 10 years as successful Commodore/Amiga developers, in
1997 Cloanto switched to "preservation mode" and released the first version
of Amiga Forever. This was followed by C64 Forever, the 8-bit complement to
Amiga Forever which is rightly seen by many as "CBM
Forever". Since then, our work in this field has always been done at little
or no pay, and with time that was taken away from other work and personal
projects. Preservation was our quiet mission long before it became a
celebrated buzzword. If you are familiar with what we do and why we do it,
the challenges, the white hair, and the thick skin you need to run such an
effort while both abiding by the law and listening to those who find fault
with doing so, you already know that we don't need to wrap the same efforts
under a "nonprofit" label to feel better. We do however realize that certain
formal structures, while adding bureaucracy and other complications that as a lean
team we are not overly enthusiastic about, may help convey trust and move towards the goals that we
have been pursuing for more than 20 years.

For these reasons, at various Commodore/Amiga events which took place between September 2014
and January 2017, we started to privately and publicly discuss possible futures involving
open source, a nonprofit and/or foundation, and other long-term preservation
scenarios for the legacy which we worked so passionately to keep alive. A lot of work
has already been done on this
front (e.g. 1,
2,
3,
4), but so much more remains
to be done. For now, this is only a discourse, and it needs your voice. On our
side, we keep working as usual, attending community events and making
things possible with the generous support of our customer-user-friends. While we already have contingency plans in place to preserve and make
accessible our work in certain scenarios, one of the goals of handing over
certain assets to a foundation or similar entity would be to better make
it prosper during our lifetimes.

If you would like to support us in any way,
or to simply express your interest in this ongoing effort, please enter your email address below.
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Either way, we will follow up to continue the conversation.

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